Metallic grinding, clanking, the clatter of pebbles, the whirr of bearings against solid lubricant: Jan opened his eyes to blindness and reached instinctively for the light.
“Wait—” Mischa spoke in a whisper that would not carry.
“Is it that close?”
“Maybe. Stay here. I’ll be right back.” He heard her get up; he heard the looker stop, as though to sniff the air.
“If you kill it,” he said, “if it doesn’t communicate again, they’ll know where we are.”
The pattern of his own blood vessels flashed against his retinas as his mind searched for something to look at. He turned his head like a blind man, listening for Mischa, afraid she had gone on.
“You’re right,” she said finally. “Damn you anyway.”
He reached out to get his balance, until his fingers brushed the wall behind him. Then he felt the cool, dry touch of Mischa’s hand; he rose and she led him away. Walking hesitantly, free hand outstretched before his face, he followed her. They moved slowly for the sake of silence. The tunnels, which before wound interminably, now stretched straight and dark forever. The sounds of the looker diminished almost imperceptibly. Jan began to feel the walls moving in and the ceiling coming down around him. This is no time, he thought, this is no time—he felt the cool delicate prickle across his shoulders, warning—no time to indulge—but a wind seemed to blow against him, bringing terror—to indulge your psychological—crystals leaped into flame across his back. His balance disappeared. He flung out his hands, Mischa pulling at him. “Jan—” But he stumbled and fell.
The impact of his palms on stone, with all his weight behind them, brought him back. He was panting. The sound of his fall echoed around them, and the pain fled in one bright flash as Mischa flicked on the light, kneeling beside him, shielding her eyes. Jan blinked. “I’m sorry… I—”
“I know,” Mischa said. “Never mind. Can you walk?”
“I think…” He pushed himself up. “Yes, okay.” With the light on, the floor returned to its proper position beneath his feet, and the ceiling stayed above him, though they were so alike that he wondered briefly, really, why they should.
Behind him, the looker whirred smoothly toward them, steadily, following the light or sound or both.
They ran.
o0o
Jan realized they were trapped.
Twice he and Mischa had turned back to avoid lookers, trying to regain some uncertainty of position, and now it was too late to kill one of the machines and break through to clear tunnels. The lookers no longer moved singly, for the caves had come together like tributaries, and with them the machines. Even the antenna mice seemed to have nested here, for the walls were studded frequently with leads; Jan thought it quite possible that the pseudosibs were now able to watch for them in real-time.
He could hear the lookers behind him, moving down the single unbranched tunnel. He was no longer leading on a merry chase, but being driven. Both he and Mischa were too tired to run any more.
“Faster!”
Jan swung around, and Mischa with him: the voice was Subtwo’s, clear, close. But the tunnel was empty to the end of Jan’s light-beam, and the voice did not come again, only a mechanical gibber and buzz.
“Subtwo’s close,” Mischa said, “but he’s not that close. The caves do that sometimes.” She strove to keep her voice steady, but Jan heard the beginning of fear. He had seen her angry, elated, grieving: but he had not seen her afraid.
They kept going.
“It might branch out again,” Jan said. “Mightn’t it?”
“Maybe. Probably. But who knows when? I wish I’d let Crab stay. He’s probably been here.”
“You can’t reach him.”
“No. Maybe he can sense me this far but I have to touch him, almost, to get anything clear.”
“What’s that up there?”
The beam of Jan’s light touched an abrupt ledge, and speared empty darkness.
The ledge was the end of the tunnel. Standing in the opening, Mischa whistled shrilly: the major echo took full seconds in return. Jan’s light would not reach the other side. On the floor of the wide cavern, stalagmites glittered damp gray, dull yellow, gray-blue. The shadows of the nearest rock formations were short and round, of those farther away long and attenuated as the angle of the illumination changed.
Mischa took Jan’s hand. “Turn out the light for just a minute.”
Reluctantly, he complied, and waited uneasily for Mischa’s eyes to reaccustom themselves to darkness. He did not wonder that the underground people had little conception of time. Time in the light and time in darkness were different things, not even comparable.
“I think we can get down,” Mischa said. “There’s a kind of crevice…”
He turned the light back on and picked out the fault; it led steeply downward. Mischa lowered herself over the edge, clutching the bare handhold of the crack, digging her toes in for better purchase. Jan hooked the flash to his belt, pulled off his boots and tossed them to the floor, counting: fifteen meters. He followed Mischa.
“It’s narrow right below you,” she said.
“It’s narrow now.” The crevice was damp and grimy, allowing only a difficult purchase. He wished his fingernails were not already broken to the quick, for he needed every bit of help he could get. Three meters above the floor, the rock sheared away beneath his weight, and he landed in a shower of bits of stone.
“You okay?”
“Nothing broken.” He put his boots back on, calming himself, straightened, flashed the light around.
They were in a stone forest, a lunar mountain range. The stalagmites were old and huge, towering above their heads, some standing alone, many so close together they formed double or triple peaks or freestanding stone curtains, flying buttresses without buildings, a labyrinth of pillars and screens.
“In a cave this big there’s got to be another way out.”
“I hope so,” Mischa said.
o0o
The wall of the cavern continued in a smooth curve, unbroken by any route of escape. The hunters behind him did not blind Jan to the beauty. The stalagmites seemed to move around him, animated, disembodied fingers, whole webbed hands, gesturing and reaching as the light glanced from their tips and left their bases in darkness. They recalled to him a mountain near his father’s estate, a solitary, ancient volcanic peak that disappeared sometimes in the clouds, “Gone visiting,” people always said; or seemed to hover on a bank of mist.
Jan and Mischa stopped before a shield of fluted rock. “Think we can get over it?”
“Want to try?”
He gave Mischa a hand up, but she could not reach the edge, even standing on his shoulders. When she jumped down, she looked into Jan’s face. He could see her searching out the lines of strain. “Let’s not do that again,” she said, and he did not argue.
The shield forced them toward the center of the labyrinth. Trying to round the barricade, they came upon another, and another: they were pushed gradually into a maze of baffles that cut them off from any sense of direction; they moved through chutes and canyons too high to climb or see over. The little sounds they made themselves, Jan’s boots on the stone, the rub of fabric, their breathing, came back to them as echo from strange directions. Then they heard, overlaid, direct noises: voices, machines. Mischa looked up and around them. Jan followed her gaze and saw his light glinting from the petrified banners above, stabbing in shafts like flares that matched his abrupt shock of apprehension. He looked down again, into Mischa’s bright green eyes. “Jan,” she said, approaching tentatively, unwillingly, with her voice, “Jan…” He knew what she was going to ask him.
He reached down and turned off the light. The darkness snapped down like a box. Mischa took his hand, tightly, reassuringly.
“I wish I had your genes,” he said.
“No, you don’t, you’d have to take my family too.” She led him forward. “Maybe we can get to the edge this way.”
Jan touched cool stone with outstretched fingertips as Mischa guided him in what seemed like circles, a serpentine route around the pinnacles. He was lost.
Brilliant lights flashed through the cavern above and around them, then the flare died to a glow too dim for sight. Jan turned toward its source; he could not see the hunting party, but the lights they carried reflected from ceiling and rock peaks in a multicolored aurora as the people gathered in the tunnel entrance and prepared to climb down.
“Come on,” Mischa said. She pulled him forward. In the brief explosion of light, he had seen a forest of solitary stalagmites and the cavern wall beyond them. They had passed through the maze.
He did not yet dare turn on his own light. Reflections wavered above him like sunlight on water, tantalizing, but never bright enough to show him a path. Mischa’s hand tightened on his.
“What is it?”
“Just there—”
Blackness against blackness: a narrow passage. Jan could make out its borders when he looked at it obliquely; straight-on, it was invisible, like anything in darkness to normal human sight. But above it, and to its left, and to its right, three identical spidery painted symbols glowed with phosphorescence, fading slowly as the excitation from the pseudosibs’ flare radiated away. Jan had seen the symbol only once before.
“Mischa—that sign…”
“Yes,” she said.
“It means ‘danger,’ doesn’t it?”
“It means strange,” she said fervently. “It means don’t go near it, because normal humans made it.”
“It was above the tube.”
“I know, but it might not, it doesn’t have to mean there’s glass down there.”
“There isn’t… another passage?”
“I can’t see one, there’s another maze beyond this one, I think.” She came forward: he could see her eyes, like a cat’s, picking up the dim, dim light, glowing brightly back at him. She gripped his forearms.
“I don’t want to go in there,” he said, very softly.
“I know.”
He looked down at her, surprised he had spoken aloud.
As he passed between and beneath the symbols, Jan felt as though they were climbing from the walls like luminous spiders, following him, crawling up his spine, driving him into hell. Remembering a story from his childhood, he wondered where the Lord of the Dead was, to take his place. He wanted sunlight and peace.
“I think the light would be okay now.”
Her voice startled him again; he had been following like an automaton, focused totally inward to avoid the darkness and his fear. He turned on Kiri’s flash. He might as well have left it off, for there was nothing to see. The featureless night almost seemed preferable to the endless passages stretching to far-off terminations in curves or perspective. He was becoming disgusted with himself for his fright and vacillations, but he was too exhausted to collect himself effectively, too close to the experiences of hurt and loneliness to put them aside for later reflection.
The passage tilted upward and grew cooler. They left footprints in the condensation, Jan’s booted, Mischa’s bare, a clear trail.
“I don’t think they’re scared yet,” Mischa said abruptly, “but they don’t like this much.”
Jan laughed, and for a little while it was easier. He could imagine Subtwo’s unease in the caves, infinitely greater than Jan’s own; and he could imagine a growing impatience among Subtwo’s people. While competent, they were misfits; they were misfits because they were immature in certain special ways: unable to sustain enthusiasm or interest in any goal repeatedly delayed, needing instant satisfaction in their endeavors. Though Subtwo was tenacious, doubts would assail him; though his people were fearless, they had no persistence. But whether those qualities would create or destroy effectiveness in this hunt depended on how long he and Mischa could force its continuation.
Jan felt himself more and more on edge. Mischa seemed not to feel it: Jan was glad he still had that much control. But the symbols at the mouth of the tunnel must have had some meaning, and he wished the danger would come, so they could face it. All the unknowns of the underground combined against him.
He noticed, for the first time, a gentle current of air flowing past him from behind, almost too light to detect. “Mischa, do you feel that?”
“Yes.”
“An exit?”
“I hope not. It isn’t nearly time for the storms to be over.”
As the tunnel narrowed, the breeze became stronger, and as they climbed, Jan could hear the whistle of wind in fissures of stone, the sigh of air, and behind it the faint, terrifying sound of wind chimes, singing in many keys.
The breeze blew cool on his back, and he shuddered.
Mischa scrambled up a giant-step, a petrified waterfall. Her shadow sprang ahead across a narrow rift. She slid into the fissure and out again. “We can get through… But, Jan—”
He climbed up beside her, hardly able to understand her for the chiming. “Just go on.”
In the narrow passage, the wind and the singing combined like the elements of a ghostly storm, pulling Jan’s breath from his throat, confusing his hearing, dimming his sight. He slid sideways with his raw fingertips hard against stone, welcoming the solidity. The volume of the music increased.
The passage opened abruptly into a wide fan-shaped chamber. Mischa turned back; he knew what she had tried to tell him.
His light glanced from edge to point of a great multicolored glass blade, and beyond to a thousand more. They shivered; the wind, swirling from constricted passages to irregular cavern, stroked their tips and excited them, an alien lover.
Jan approached the hanging garden. The spikes were crystals within crystals: one shape, in one transparent color, overlaid by another geometric form, like the experiment of some gigantic child. They were a hundred times the size of the crystals he had fallen through, but he knew his blundering must have destroyed a place of nearly equal beauty. He took another step forward, lifting his hand, drawn to reach out for the brilliant spires.
“Jan—”
But he already knew that no natural deposition of mineral could have formed these constructs; their beauty was that of danger, their attraction that of disaster. Jan let his hand drop in a gesture of acceptance, denial.
“I’m all right now,” he said. “Let’s go.”
In places they could move between the glittering blades, and their passing changed the melody of the crystal song, introducing discord, as though the inanimate growths were beings, resenting the intrusion.
Farther on, they had to crawl, and the wind sucked more strongly, for the crystals grew so close together that there was no room to pass between them. The tips of the glass shivered visibly, moving in rapid, minuscule vibrations. Then, just to Mischa’s left, a delicate shaft shuddered and broke with a high, sharp note, and shattered on the stone. Jan saw Mischa fling up her arm to shield her eyes; his own reflexes pulled him around and away. When the bright music stopped, he looked back at her. Her face was unmarked, but she slid rapidly toward him through fragments of crystal so small they swirled in the air, sparkling. “Hurry up,” she said. “It’s bad to breathe the dust.” As she spoke he smelled the acrid odor and felt the drifting chemicals dissolving in the back of his throat. He pushed himself on, hearing Mischa behind him. She started to cough.
The crystals they passed grew progressively shorter and thinner, until Mischa and Jan could stand, aching, and run beneath a glittering ceiling of natural semiprecious stones. Human laughter suddenly laced the music, and abruptly the wind-chimes changed from a song of solitude to one of destruction, directed by human voices. The blades broke and shattered, with a shriek nearly animate, of splendor and delicacy reduced to nothing. Entropy over all. Jan almost understood the strength of his own anger.
o0o
In the wide cone of his flash, Jan could see ahead to a cross-tunnel, where the mixing breezes spun wind-devils of dust. A scattering of black sand scratched against the soles of his boots. His throat burned. For a moment he thought that was the reason for a new smell that seemed to surround him, but it grew stronger as they continued. It was totally unlike the bitter chemical odor: it was the dreadful sick-sweet smell of decay.
It permeated the tunnel, even against the air currents, until, when Jan and Mischa reached the junction of passages, it was almost overwhelming. Jan saw Mischa clench her jaw tight, rigid, and he fought the same rising nausea.
The tunnel behind them they could not use again. To their right, the wind funneled upward to the surface, whirling through an unclimbable vertical shaft. Jan could not see its end, nor even a hint of daylight, but he could hear the whining of the storm.
From some other source to his left, the miasma emanated. There was no other choice. Jan said nothing, and Mischa did not break the silence.
The stench thickened, until Jan felt he should be able to put up his hands and push it away. He was breathing in tiny shallow gulps, his mouth slightly open, throat tight. His eyes watered.
The texture under his feet changed, softening. A gray mat of hyphae spread across the stone, up the walls, finally across the ceiling to join itself. At first it seemed dry and soft, but when it thickened, Jan’s boots sank squishily into the growth, and rose as though from thick porridge. He looked over at Mischa, walking barefoot, and shuddered.
“It’s—” Her voice was hoarse, half an octave lower than normal. She coughed and tried again. “It’s just lightcells.”
He turned out the flash; instead of darkness, he was surrounded by a blue-gray twilight. The flash had washed out the glow. Mischa was a shadow. Jan glanced over his shoulder: the two sets of footprints stretched away clear and black. His eyes began to adjust to the dim light.
“Are you all right?” The gravelly quality of her voice worried him.
“I will be.”
They spoke no more; they needed what breath they could draw, and the air grew thicker, warmer, like the brightening growth of cells around them. The passage began to tilt downward again. Jan and Mischa moved more cautiously, for the footing became increasingly precarious as the pitch of the slope grew steeper. There was nothing to hold to, nothing to brace against. Jan’s boots began to slide, with each step a little father, as the friction between him and the slimy floor became insufficient to hold him steady against gravity.
Mischa cried out. Sliding, she threw herself backward to counteract her forward momentum, landing hard on elbow and hip. Jan lunged for her, felt the rough material of her jacket beneath his fingertips, and lost her and his balance as well. He fell sideways down the slope; his palm slid through the mushy growth and he clawed for rock, but lightcells squished out between his fingers and he began to tumble and slide. He felt the mass piling up before him like snow, like surf; it washed over his head and he threw his arms across his face, sickened by the thought of its covering him, like grave rot. He abandoned any attempt to check his fall.
Jan felt the blow when he stopped: felt it but did not react to it; he was too dizzy, too sick, too confused. The atmosphere was so oppressive that he thought he could not open his eyes. A hollow breathlessness emptied him of strength. He thought he would faint: there could be no room for oxygen in the chemical soup he breathed.
He dragged himself up, using as support the rock that had stopped him. His ribs ached where he had struck.
The great vault into which they had fallen was suffused with the glow of life-surviving-on-death. Jan heard small sounds of animals, then, low at first, rising to a scream, the cry of something large and feline. He shivered.
The scar of Mischa’s fall passed beyond the boulder. She lay a few meters farther on, face down, her hand submerged in murky, fetid water. She did not move. Past her, in the water, Jan saw other forms, some dark, shrouded, and new, some old and decomposing, overgrown with light. The shore of the pool was jagged and irregular with piles of bones: skulls; entire, articulated hands; shattered, fang-marked leg bones. This was the final resting place of Center’s dead. The sour taste of bile rose in Jan’s throat. He gagged and his reflexes overcame him; he retched drily, falling to his knees. Afterward, he knelt, breathing heavily, drawing the products of corruption into his lungs, accepting, knowing that he was their past, as they were his future.
He rose again and walked slowly to Mischa. She appeared so limp that he was afraid, imagining that she might have joined the luminous multitude. But as he knelt, she stirred. His relief was greater than any horror he had felt. He helped her up. Her hair clung in glowing strands to her cheek. She looked out over the water.
“Gods,” she said. “So this is where they come.”
“Yes.” But for all Jan’s acceptance, he did not look again. He was afraid he would see a shroud of black silk, embroidered with bright figures. “Let’s get out of here.”
Searching for an escape, they found a door. They almost passed it, but Mischa noticed the regular rectangular indentation and began to scrape away the lightcells. After a moment Jan helped her. They bared a featureless slab of gray plastic, the first evidence of construction Jan had seen since leaving Center. He recalled the three symbols of warning. They had survived the crystals, and the pool.
Mischa reached out and pushed the door. It swung open slowly. The musty air that flowed across them seemed incredibly, sweetly, blessedly fresh.
o0o
Subtwo fled, revolted, from the obscene pool. Even the respirator he wore could not keep out the stench. He was going to vomit: he could feel his body preparing to scorn him. He had never vomited in his life. The retching started and the facemask strangled him. He tore it away so he would not soil himself. He was forced to halt his flight. He tried to disassociate his mind from his body to spare himself humiliation and disgust, but failed.
He stumbled to his feet and ran again, headlong, hardly noticing that the fungal carpet no longer slowed him, that the tunnel was no longer a natural cave, that his people no longer followed him. It was only gradually, as the putrescent odor faded from his nostrils, that he realized he had escaped. The first thing he noticed consciously was that the air was clean: musty, but sterile. He slowed and stopped.
The hallway around him was white self-luminous plastic, perfectly smooth, perfectly regular: a golden rectangle in cross-section, a beautiful, elegant, naked place. Subtwo laid his hands against the cool wall and pressed his forehead to the surface. The exquisite smoothness calmed him slightly; lifting his head, he looked around.
He was alone. The open door at the end of the passage seemed very far away, and he would not return to it. His people…
They had broken the crystal stalactites, erupting in an orgy of destruction Subtwo was powerless to temper or control. Yet he had not been too displeased by their childish violence, despite the dreadful cacophony. The sharp spires would be easier to walk over than between, and Subtwo was dedicated to expediency.
He noticed the bright dust and stepped back, as was his fastidious habit. The smell of it, the taste, burned the mucous membranes of his nose and throat just as Draco, at the head of the laughing group, doubled up and began to cough. The laughing stopped.
In a brief, shocked moment of silence between the end of the destruction of mineral and the beginning of the destruction of flesh, Subtwo flung open one of the carrying machines and found the respirators. He protected himself first, and called to his people to retreat.
Draco collapsed beyond the carpet of shattered jewels. Subtwo dragged him to a place where the air was clearer. The raiders who had been behind the dust were helping those who had been in it. Draco clawed at his throat, struggling for breath. Subtwo rammed a breathing tube past his swollen tongue and fumbled with antihistamines in the injector. The hunting party was well supplied, but the medic had stayed with Subone. Draco convulsed, and Subtwo held him still with sheer physical strength, no art about it, clumsily struggling to inject the medicine.
Three people choked to death before they could be helped. There were not enough breathing tubes, and more than half of Subtwo’s people were crippled, needing aid that could not be given. He raged at the trap into which he had been lured, no longer needing to draw on Subone’s anger: his own was by far more powerful. He had always been the more powerful, even in the early days of their lives when neither knew of the other’s existence, but each controlled the other.
Those of his raiders who were still able readied themselves at his order. Draco rose and staggered about, searching for his weapons, respirator, another painkiller, a stimulant. Passing near Subtwo, he looked up, his pupils dilated wide. Subtwo understood that the young man was willing to kill himself, and this disturbed him vaguely, but he could not take the time to trace out why.
“I must leave someone in charge,” he said abruptly. “There may be attacks on our casualties. We must be certain they are secure. Are you able?”
Draco started to protest, Subtwo thought, but words failed him; he had to suppress another spasm of coughing.
“I require someone I can trust.”
Draco’s voice, finally, was a hesitant rasp, burned out, resentful. “All right.” He seemed shamed as much by his failure to protest as by his incapacity.
o0o
Jan Hikaru’s Journal:
Mischa is sleeping. Her breathing is harsh, but it sounds better than it did earlier.
I’m very uncomfortable here. We’re in a missile base, either for the defense of Center, or an offensive installation with Center as its backup—before the Last War. The third symbol: a place that humans made. It is indeed. But I can’t feel any kinship with those humans.
But would we, in the Sphere, act any differently, given the same choices the people of earth had? We’re very used to thinking of our home planet with contempt: they killed each other, they erupted in a tantrum of mass suicide and killed a whole world. There has never been another war.
We never mention that the same people drained their world dry to send us to new places.
Are we peaceful only because wars don’t make economic sense anymore? Do we have a right to assume our superiority?
The myths are strong, though, and I feel oppressed. These are nuclear warheads all around us, I think—fission-triggered fusion bombs. The dirty kind, the kind that do more damage with their by-products than with their original explosions.
But the ones here were never fired. I wonder if that’s because Center was never directly attacked, or because communications were destroyed and no one here ever received the orders, or, perhaps, because one person was unable, in the end, to push the buttons that would set them off.
I’d like to believe the last.
o0o
After resting, after making the injured as comfortable as possible, leaving them guarded and supplied, the remains of the hunting party had continued, breaking through the rest of the crystals while well protected in respirators and coveralls, and without laughter. Subtwo’s people were frightened, and he had never seen them frightened before. Their unease affected him, for he had thought them beyond fear, or incapable of it.
They reached the fungal growth, which revolted him; he ordered it burned. The weapons cooked and sizzled it. But the task proceeded much too slowly, and frayed the nerves. The power of the laser lances made smoke and steam and heat billow up around the people, and the limestone began to crumble. Subtwo was disgusted at himself for failing to predict that particular danger: simple chemistry, which should be virtually instinctive. Exhorting his followers, he abandoned the burning and led them onward through the vile growths, pointing out the footprints of their quarry: See, there is no water collected in the indentations. See, how fresh the tracks must be. We have not much longer to wait now. But his people had abandoned their rages. They were exhausted, their throats were sore, their ears rang; they could not even sit down comfortably to rest.
When they came to the steep slick hill, they almost refused to continue. They saw that Mischa and Jan had fallen, and though rock formations prevented their seeing the bottom of the slope, they argued that their prey must have perished. Subtwo berated himself for preventing Draco from coming: he would not have faltered; he would have given the others courage.
Subtwo had stood before them, rage tightening his voice. But the mask muffled his words, and he sounded, even to himself, quite ineffectual. He broke off his speech and looked at his people in silence, seeing what a motley and pitiful group they were, outcasts… like himself. “Follow me or not, as you will,” he said, turned and plunged down the slope.
It seemed to him as he leaped downward, trying to keep his balance, that the underground had tried to kill him thrice: by poison with the crystals, by disease and dissolution with the fungus, and now by falling. Irrationally he thought that if he could survive this time, he would succeed in all he sought under the earth, that if he faltered, he would fail in everything.
The pitch of the slope increased abruptly. He ran faster, trying desperately to remain upright. His feet squelched in the thick globs of mold. He was running down the wall like an impossible insect. He cried out before he even slipped, for all the factors came together in his mind, sliding into an equation of incredible complexity, and he understood that the unknowns had no acceptable solution.
He fell.
The water closed in over him, shocking him from insensible dizziness, closing over the facemask, dirty, bubbling. He struggled up, but his hands and knees sank into what had seemed like solid ground. He floundered toward the shore: the bank came away in his fingers, crumbling. One solid bar remained; he jabbed it down and pulled against it, and by sheer adrenalin-spiked terror he escaped the sticky morass behind him.
He stood shivering, his hand clenched around the only fragment of solidity in this place, whatever it was. But a ghastly stench reached him faintly through the respirator. Simultaneously, he saw the bodies in the water and on the bank, he realized how the mold could grow so lushly, and he recognized the thing in his hand as a human bone.
His breath rasped softly, then louder. He flung the bone away, and he felt the weight of water and organic matter impregnating his clothing, and blindly ran, clawing frantically at bits of damp matter that clung to him like leeches, crying faintly from deep in his chest.
The underground had won; this was to be his final resting place, the complete antithesis of all he had ever believed in.
o0o
Now, alone, totally alone, Subtwo stumbled down the corridor. His clothing seemed to crawl against his skin. He began to pluck it off, holding the material by corners and fastenings, in the tips of his fingers, even though he was wearing gloves. The gloves were last to go; he threw them down and they thudded wetly to the floor. He abandoned them gladly; naked, he proceeded, for he could not turn back, even to try to find his people. He retained only his laser lance, which he clenched tightly in his fist, as though it could stop the trembling of his hands. Unused to nudity, he felt uncomfortable and vulnerable, and wished for improvements in the male human body, or for Subone to take his place. Yet even the exposure was better than remaining in those stinking garments. The reek still clung to him, to his skin, to his hair. With vague gratitude he clung to the memory that he had not breathed the stuff, it had not flowed into his nose or mouth or lungs. If it had, he surely would have gone insane.
His body threatened to revolt again with nausea, so Subtwo dragged his attention completely back to the present.
The corridor ended abruptly with an elevator. Subtwo entered it, quite conscious of his peril. It looked very old: perhaps it would jam, and he would starve or suicide. But it was the only path. He did not even know if he was still following any kind of trail: he strained to remember if he had noticed footprints to this hallway, but he could not force himself to recall the scene. He touched the single button on the wall panel, a control without markings. The door slid shut, without a sound, but slowly like an ancient wraith.
Panic touched him again, when the cage fell. He did not want to go deeper into the earth.
As he moved downward, on and on, it seemed to him that Subone should be here; it seemed to him that his pseudosib had changed, since they had come to Center, in ways that would have permitted him to endure this trial much better.
Subtwo braced himself against the deceleration. The elevator door opened.
He was prepared for darkness, so the light startled and disturbed him. Much brighter than the dim illumination his eyes had become accustomed to, the glaring blue-white radiance dazzled him. He blinked into it, and gradually made out a long, wide, high chamber, as regular in design as the corridor and the elevator. Thick pillars rose in a pleasingly regular manner. Moving into the room, Subtwo felt a gentle whisper of air, which alerted him for the presence of other human beings. But the place had a calm and deserted feel about it, dustless, odorless; chromed machines clustered about the bases of the columns, metal shiny and unfingerprinted. He felt, he knew, no human beings lived here. The ventilation would be automatic, the machines self-sustaining. No organic matter soiled this vault.
o0o
Suddenly he stopped and spun around, staring up at the columns, straight-sided, sloping to a narrower radius at their centers and again near their tips, with round black holes above them; they circled him as though they were moving and he were standing still, as he recognized them for what they were.